Sweden has previously had national strategies against violent extremism and terrorism, but no national strategy against organised crime. The Swedish Minister of Justice, Gunnar Strömmer, presented the new strategy today, 2 February 2024.
Organised crime is a systemic threat and affects people's safety and security as well as vital societal functions. Therefore, after a year of work in collaboration with authorities and other key stakeholders, the Government has today decided on Sweden's first national strategy against organised crime.
"The destructive power of organised crime was underestimated for too long in too many parts of society. Since the change of government, therefore, a major policy shift is underway to push back crime and restore security for honest citizens throughout the country" says the Minister.
The strategy aims to provide a clearer direction for the entire system's work against organised crime and reduce the vulnerabilities that crime exploits. The national strategy therefore formulates problem images, indicates directions for measures, identifies key actors and describes the most important work that is ongoing and that needs to be carried out in the future.
The strategy highlights five important areas where the work needs to be strengthened:
- Efforts need to be directed at individuals to stop criminal careers.
- Criminals' access to illegal weapons and explosives needs to be reduced.
- We must dismantle the criminal economy.
- Society needs to become more robust against unauthorised influence from criminal actors.
- It must become more difficult to falsify identities and the authorities' ability to exchange information must be improved.
Based on the strategy, the Government will in the future prepare and decide in the usual way on government assignments, commissions of inquiry, bills and ordinances, etc. The Government intends to continuously monitor the work in each strategic target area and return to the Riksdag with an overall report on how the work against organised crime is progressing.
In the process of developing the strategy, which spans several policy areas, meetings have been held with authorities in the Council against Organised Crime and with representatives of municipalities and other stakeholders to gather information about their perspectives, challenges and needs.
Read the strategy: link to the Government's website (in Swedish).
Related news: link to the Government's homepage for combating terrorism (in English).
